


Warning Signs

by Jean_grantaire



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 08:26:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11665338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jean_grantaire/pseuds/Jean_grantaire
Summary: Tell me what happens if your love goes to sleep?Tell me what happens if I’m not the one you want to keep?





	Warning Signs

**Author's Note:**

> Set after season 2. The Chevalier copes.

The Chevalier de Lorraine glared bitterly at the solid wooden door across the room from him, as though by sheer force of will he could silence the low murmur of voices on the other side and all of the implications they carried. Would it be the plain-faced Princess Palatine tonight? Had Thomas and his feral moustache already worked their way to the top of Monsieur’s collection of mignons? Perhaps there was even a new favourite – not that the Chevalier would know. It had been made perfectly clear that the goings-on within the Duke of Orleans’ bedchamber were no longer his business.

Thoroughly lost in his jealous thoughts, it wasn’t until the door swung open that the Chevalier realised the voices had stopped. The silence turned sharp with the tension in the room as his attention was drawn (always, inescapably) towards the figure of Philippe in the doorway.

Even if the Chevalier hadn’t quite managed to crush the flicker of hope within himself at the sight of him, the expression on Philippe’s face certainly managed the job for him. Cold disapproval was an unsettling expression on him, far less familiar to the Chevalier than his anger. An angry Philippe could be an irrational Philippe, but that cold expression spoke of a mind made up.

“What are you doing here?” Philippe’s voice echoed slightly around the room, distorting his tone so that it sounded even harsher. “Haven’t I told you to stay away from me?” He advanced a couple of steps into the room and Thomas came into view over his shoulder, wearing nothing but an unpleasant smile. The unspoken truths between that and the tangled mess that had become of his hair tore at the Chevalier’s heart.

He struggled to put on a confident façade, to find any words at all, but after only a few moments his efforts were cut short as Philippe rolled his eyes. 

“Pathetic. Get out.”

“Why?” The words came out steady, thankfully, as bitter as the feelings that had been growing like vines of ivy inside the Chevalier since Philippe’s new wife first arrived at Versailles, smothering every bond of trust and twisting the words and actions that reached him into dark, cold forms.

“I don’t love you.” 

The words hit him like the physical force of running full-pelt into a wall, and it was suddenly very difficult to breathe. The room seemed to shrink around them, the bitter tension in the air winding the walls closer and closer together. The Chevalier spun around and left on unsteady yet swift feet. Through the door, the silent guards outside little more than blue ghosts at the corner of his vision as he passed them. Down a corridor draped in the same finery as the rest of the palace. In that moment, it felt more like a gilded cage than the centre of the world.

“Did you seriously think I still would? You were a fun distraction, my sweet Chevalier, but you were never worth anything more.” Startled by the Philippe’s apparently disembodied voice, the Chevalier turned a corner and sped up, though the walls moved so slowly past him he might as well have been wading through water. His feet stuck to the marble floor with every step as though the palace was consciously dragging him down, holding him captive, forcing him to listen.

“I could scarcely trust you before, and now I have to think of my wife. Our child. You aren’t worth the smallest fraction of them.” The Chevalier set his jaw and swallowed past the ache in his throat. He couldn’t let Philippe reduce him to tears, couldn’t hand him more fuel to voice his devastating opinions, couldn’t let him see how deeply he cared. 

Briefly, the Chevalier entertained the idea of arguing back - given time to feed his anger and find some powder or something to drink, he wouldn’t have hesitated to – but every reminder of Philippe brought him back to the scene he had just witnessed, and the wound of betrayal it had left on his heart was too fresh to have yet hardened into anger.

He stumbled down a staircase, clinging to the banister as if the floor might otherwise swallow him whole. As he descended a doorway came into view near the foot of the stairs, illuminated by the warm light spilling out from beneath the door. The Chevalier felt weak with relief. Surely any fresh company could not be worse.

“In fact, you’re hardly worth anything at all.”

The voice prompted him to lurch forwards, and the palace let him. After moving so slowly for so long, the sudden return to a normal speed felt like hurtling out of control. At least that was familiar. A moment’s desperate scrabble with the door handle later and he was inside, safe from Versailles’ relentless labyrinth of corridors as he slammed the door shut behind himself and slid down it onto the floor, resting his head against the wood.

Silence stretched across the room for a few fragile moments before it was broken by great, gasping sobs. The Chevalier was certain that he had escaped the last of Philippe’s presence, he could feel it, but now in his absence there was nothing to prevent him from crumbling under the weight of those truths that had been so ruthlessly hurled at him.

I don’t love you. It echoed around his head, wrapped around his entire body, each syllable an icy finger reaching through his chest to drag his heart down into the pit of his stomach, leaving behind a cold, empty space and a stinging, frozen path cut straight through his body. 

Hardly worth anything at all. He could feel the weight of every letter as though they were wrapped around his ribs, squeezing the air out of him from the outside as well as from within. The Chevalier’s body was a cage too small to contain all of his grief, his fury against Thomas for daring to daring to steal his Philippe and against Philippe for letting him, the overwhelming hopelessness that stretched its jaws wide within his chest and threatened to swallow him whole.

It was only once his sobbing had subsided into uneven, shaking breaths that the Chevalier became aware that he wasn’t alone in the room. Somewhere behind him came the faint rustle of skirts; from another corner of the room, a question whispered from one ear to another.

He spun around and scrambled to his feet. The salon (for it was obvious now that it was a salon) was filled with girls, though it was impossible to identify any of them for their identical dresses and (shiny, elaborately-styled) curls. They were gathered around the card tables like petals on roses, no doubt concealing thorny stems beneath their dresses and clouds of perfume. Despite how obviously the room’s attention rested on the Chevalier in the near-silence that had fallen since his arrival, his eyes failed to find a single one of their faces. All of them hid behind cards, or fans, or were turned away; individually, each girl looked natural, but to take in the room as a whole it was both very apparent and deeply unsettling.

The chevalier moved to step forwards and found the air in front of him as solid as a wall. He righted himself and found the empty space indifferent to his second attempt, then to presses of his fingers and shoves from his palms. 

“Who’s there?” His voice trembled slightly through the room, but managed at least to ring through the air that had so stubbornly rejected his body. “What do you want?”

Noble heads all turned at once, puppets, performers on a stage rather than elite society around their business tables. Not that there was any difference, in this pla-

He froze, right down to the breath catching in his throat, as their faces came into sight. The same elegant face, the same wide forehead and large, lifeless eyes stared back at him from every table and every corner of the room. 

“No.” The Chevalier had intended his tone to be an order but it emerged more of a croak. The air in his lungs felt almost as solid as that keeping him trapped by the door; his tongue was heavy and useless in his mouth. He swallowed. Tried again. “You were not my fault!”

None of the faces showed anything beyond indifference towards his words, no more impressed with his shout than with his whisper. Isabelle continued to stare at him, each pair of her dead eyes full of unspoken accusation, winding around his body like chains until he felt claustrophobic inside his own skin, trapped beneath their weight. 

“I wasn’t even there!” They rose from chairs and the shadows at the back of the salon and advanced towards him in unison, soft on their feet and predator-like in their steps. Not a single pair of eyes strayed from his face.

The Chevalier backed up until he was pressed against ornately-carved wood, the door handle digging into his lower back. He fumbled for it with shaking fingers to find it jammed shut, resistant to even the most desperate efforts of his hands. 

“You killed me.”

The words came as an echoing hiss, impossible to trace back to their source as not a single pair of lips moved. The Chevalier was distracted from his efforts at the door and spun back around to face the room, acutely aware now of how trapped he was, forced to face this ghost that had sprung so fresh from his past.

“I didn’t-- I-I wasn’t even-- I helped you, you would have been a nobody here without me-” His words tripped over each other in their haste to make it out of his mouth, a torrent of excuses pouring forth from him in the hopes of finding the right one to make the menacing advance stop.

Isabelle was very close now, most of the salon obscured behind her many skirts and cold, spiritless faces. The Chevalier wasn’t convinced that she could even hear him.

“No, please, I-”

The bodies closest to the barrier of air that held the Chevalier captive by the door came to a halt, the rest continuing to press closer behind them like a cloud thickening and darkening just before the storm hits. One bare, delicate hand reached out towards him, passing through the air without hesitation to unfurl inches from his face. The fingers tapered to dark, sharp claws where her fingertips should have been.

The Chevalier pressed back against the door, scrambling as though he could push himself backwards through the wood with the sheer desperation of his efforts, his gaze flying up in horror to meet the eyes of the hand’s owner. A wicked smile curved across her lips, pink parting to reveal too many ivory teeth, each cut to a wicked point at the tip, framing the cavernous black hole of her mouth as her jaws opened impossibly wide.

They dived towards him as one.

He screamed.

 

The scream followed the Chevalier as he jolted into the waking world, echoing out around the room until he realised the source of the sound to be his own mouth and closed it tightly, stifling the sound. He reached instinctively for the solid, comforting warmth of Philippe’s body next to his own, and it was only when his hand caught nothing more than a handful of cold, empty sheets that reality caught up with him.

He rolled over to face away from the unpleasant wrongness of the space beside him. The sweat-dampened sheets clung to him as he moved, prompting him to throw them off and climb out of bed altogether, escaping their sticky grip and its unpleasant reminder of his nightmare. At least they were softer than claws and teeth.

His toes curled into the comfort of the thick rug at his feet as he poured himself a glass of water from the jug at the bedside table, the water splashing around the glass and spilling slightly over the sides as his hands trembled too much to hold the jug steady; though the nightmare had stopped the moment he opened his eyes, the memory of it sat close and heavy on his shoulders, a cloak he was yet to fully shake off.

Blind in the near-perfect darkness of the room, the Chevalier made his way over to the nearest window by memory alone. The path was well-worn in his mind, one trodden almost every night and usually around this time, when sleep had released him from her vicious clutches.

Beyond the curtains lay peaceful darkness, a thick layer of clouds shutting out the light of the moon and blanketing Versailles in a deep black night. Behind the curtains stood his bedchamber, in his rooms, draped in finery and the latest fashions, filled with expensive furniture and unmistakably his own and yet so empty and off-balance without any traces of Philippe that he could sometimes hardly bear to look at any of it.

It was ironic to think that he’d finally been granted his own space at court just as his home had left for a war miles and miles away.

He will be back. The Chevalier repeated the words to himself in his mind, over and over. If he pretended hard enough, they almost sounded like a promise.

He will be back.

**Author's Note:**

> Please note this is intended to be show-accurate rather than historically accurate. I'm not sure the Chevalier would have seen himself as totally responsible for Isabelle's death, but he was certainly affected by it and i mean i had a nightmare the other night about a black sails/shrek crossover so it's not beyond the realms of possibility for him to have bad dreams about her.  
> Find me at @almostasunking on tumblr!
> 
> Edit: I forgot to add this when I posted, but the title and summary are from Rob Houchen's Warning Signs (check it out on YouTube, he's an incredibly singer!)


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